“My children are murmuring farewell,” said the Count. “I hear them. It is time! Good-bye, Miss Enfilden--my friend, if I may call you so. May Allah have you in his keeping, and when your summons comes, obey it--alone.” As he said the last word his grating voice dropped to a deep note of earnest, almost solemn, gravity. Then he lifted his hat, touched his horse with his heel, and galloped away into the sun. Domini watched the three riders till they were only specks on the surface of the desert. Then they became one with it, and were lost in the dreamlike radiance of the morning. But she did not move. She sat with her eyes fixed up on the blue horizon. A great loneliness had entered into her spirit. Till Count Anteoni had gone she did not realise how much she had become accustomed to his friendship, how near their sympathies had been. But directly those tiny, moving specks became one with the desert she knew that a gap had opened in her life. It might be small, but it seemed dark and deep. For the first time the desert, which she had hitherto regarded as a giver, had taken something from her. And now, as she sat looking at it, while the sun grew stronger and the light more brilliant, while the mountains gradually assumed a harsher aspect, and the details of things, in the dawn so delicately clear, became, as it were, more piercing in their sharpness, she realised a new and terrible aspect of it. That which has the power to bestow has another power. She had seen the great procession of those who had received gifts of the desert’s hands. Would she some day, or in the night when the sky was like a sapphire, see the procession of those from whom the desert had taken away perhaps their dreams, perhaps their hopes, perhaps even all that they passionately loved and had desperately clung to? And in which of the two processions would she walk? She got up with a sigh. The garden had become tragic to her for the moment, full of a brooding melancholy. As she turned to leave it she resolved to go to the priest. She had never yet entered his house. Just then she wanted to speak to someone with whom she could be as a little child, to whom she could liberate some part of her spirit simply, certain of a simple, yet not foolish, reception of it by one to whom she could look up. She desired to be not with the friend so much as with the spiritual director. Something was alive within her, something of distress, almost of apprehension, which needed the soothing hand, not of human love, but of religion.